1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for installing printer drivers of image forming apparatuses in a printing environment that employs a universal printer driver.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, when an image forming apparatus (such as a printer) prints a document prepared by a host device (such as a personal computer (PC)), the host device needs a printer driver for driving the image forming apparatus. The printer driver serves to transform data prepared by using an application program of the host device into data that is interpretable by the image forming apparatus. The host device performs bidirectional communication with the image forming apparatus through the printer driver. In general, since interpretable data vary according to the image forming apparatus, a printer driver corresponding to a model of an image forming apparatus to be used has to be installed in the host device. In order to reduce the inconvenience of installing a print driver corresponding to an image forming apparatus, a universal printer driver (UPD) has been introduced.
FIG. 1 illustrates the structure of a universal printer driver. As shown in FIG. 1, the universal printer driver includes a script file 110 including information on each model of image forming apparatus so as to support a driver core 100 and a plurality of image forming apparatus models. More specifically, the script file 110 includes model names of connected image forming apparatuses 120 to 160 for recognizing the image forming apparatuses 120 to 160, information on whether the type of each image forming apparatus is of a color type or mono type, information on whether the printing resolution is 1200 dpi or 600 dpi, information on the number of paper feeder boxes, information on whether the maximum size of print papers is A4 or A3, and the like. When using the universal printer driver, it is possible to support the plurality of image forming apparatuses 120 to 160 by using the information specified for each image forming apparatus model. At this time, the universal printer driver can operate in two modes: a general mode and a dynamic mode. In the general mode, the universal printer driver operates like a conventional printer driver. That is, the script file 110, including the printer driver core 100 and information specified for an image forming apparatus model selected by a user, is fixed. In contrast, in the dynamic mode, in order to bind the script file 110 including the printer driver core 100 and the information specified for an image forming apparatus model whenever the printer driver is used, it is required to designate an image forming apparatus that is to be used.
To address this inconvenience, an option for fixedly using the printer driver of the image forming apparatus has been proposed. When the fixed printer driver is limitlessly used, a plurality of printer drivers of image forming apparatuses is installed in the host device, like in the case of conventional printer drivers. In this case, however, the plurality of printer drivers occupy a large part of the memory of the host device.